Doctors are paid £162m to treat 95,000 ‘ghost patients’

GPs have been overpaid hundreds of millions of pounds for âghost patientsâ who have moved or died.

Doctors being paid £65 for each patient (Picture: Alamy)

Doctors were receiving money for more than 95,000 people who should have been removed from practice lists in England and Wales, investigators found. Some payments were made for patients who died more 40 years ago.

But many more ghosts may yet be uncovered; there are 52.5million people in England but 55million names registered with GPs.

With doctors being paid £65 for each patient on their lists, it could mean as much as £162million a year is lost to the NHS.

Health minister Lord Howe said: âIdentifying ghost patients will ensure that practices are fairly funded only for the patients they are responsible for. The NHS needs to make the best use of the funds it has.â

The 95,000 ghosts were uncovered during a one-year blitz on GP practices by spending watchdog the Audit Commission.

The biggest proportion â more than 32,000 â were those who had died. In one case, a GP was paid for a patient who died in 1969; a further 335 patients died in the 1980s, while another 429 had died in the 1990s.

Other ghosts included 30,000 patients who had moved to another practice and almost 10,000 failed asylum-seekers, who had to leave the country.

Another 20,000 patients were removed after investigators found high numbers of people registered at the same property.

Taking the 95,000 off the lists saved the NHS £6.1million a year but the Audit Commission said the sum could have been higher if all its leads had been rigorously pursued by the health trusts which are supposed to update the lists.

However, the British Medical Association warned there were reports of âover-zealous list cleanersâ removing valid â often vulnerable â patients.